If you had to guess where Baylor would be eights from today in 2002, 2007, 20, your answer would vary greatly in all of those years. And some schools may fall apart in football or basketball. Schools that seem in perfect positions may falter academically or financially. Brands that seem toxic now may look different in seven or eight years. Third, many universities will be in different spots in 20. What schools value or consider important will change as the men and women running colleges will change. We often fall victim to assuming that the way things are now will continue indefinitely into the future. And if Nebraska remains in the Big 12, the college landscape is a lot different. Someone else might have made a different call. He’d dealt with and was tired of the league being dominated by Texas. If Texas had different leadership in 2011, then maybe the Longhorns would have left for the PAC-12. Mack Brown and DeLoss Dodds liked the Big 12. Second, realignment will be decided by presidents, board members, athletic directors and coaches who will different in 20. And if you don’t know how the distribution of money will look in 2024, then it’s difficult to know if expansion, contraction or dissolution is the best option for certain conferences. I’m not sure what the revenue landscape will look like in those years. I’m not sure who will run any of these companies in seven years. But that’s the real point: the future of sports media is difficult to predict. I think it’s less likely those sources provide the kind of revenue ESPN did in an era where millions of people with no interest in sports were paying $6.00+ a month for ESPN in a cable bundle. Maybe Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook or even virtual reality could make sports rights more valuable. Second, new media companies could make strange bids. Traditional cable networks may not bid as much in the next wave of realignment, and when the pie shrinks, the world can get wild. ESPN and other cable networks are losing millions of subscribers because of cord cutting. First, revenue for cable companies is dissipating. If current GOR means that movement is unlikely until 2024 or 2025, then we should all recognize the world is going to be radically different by then. Why would Texas or Oklahoma bolt for a different league in 2021 or sometime before the expiration of the GOR, if they feared Baylor, Kansas State, Iowa State and West Virginia would sue for all lost television revenue from them not fulfilling their contracts? Maybe nearly all the members of the Big 12 end up in different leagues and the Big 12’s GOR becomes irrelevant, but the threat that a few members would stay behind and sue to enforce the GOR would make any move before that date difficult. The PAC 12’s runs through the 2023-2024 season. The Big 12’s Grant of Rights (GOR) runs through the 2024-2025 season. The biggest reason is that there’s a ton of time left for teams in their current television contracts. Realignment is tough to predict for a host of reasons. We should all be cognizant that being right once may not tell us much about the future. But being right about what the Big 12 would do in 2016 tells us little about what happens next. Sure enough, the Big 12 spent a lot of time contemplating and ultimately added nobody. My thesis was that at least three schools would block any new member because the benefit from adding any new institution did not outweigh the problems those new schools would present in the next wave of realignment. When many seemed certain the Big 12 would expand, I argued that the Big 12 would remain at 10 members. I was right about the last round of realignment, but that means nothing for the future. The truth everyone should admit is that they have no idea what the next wave of realignment will bring. Those variables would include: the state of the economy in 2024, what happened in the 2020 election, if the country is at war and who is running for President in 2024.ĭespite recognizing how ridiculous it is to believe anybody can tell you who will win the 2024 Presidential election, some people are now acting certain about how conference realignment will look in 20. You’d have to sort through a million variables that will be relevant to have any confidence in that prediction. If someone asked you who will win the 2024 Presidential election, you’d probably recognize that’s nearly impossible to do.
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